Why is my smoke simulation not updating?
This appears to be the result of a couple things:

Negative start frame.
The simulator doesn't seem to like this, I suspect that it's a bug that negative start frames are even possible to set. (will report later)

The start of the scene animation is after the start of the simulation.
Blender only simulates when the animation is played from the starting frame of the simulation (not sure why it worked at all in your case actually).
Once the simulation is Baked or cached you can start at any point.


If you set the simulation start frame to 0 in Physics &gt; Smoke Cache and then Bake, it works as expected.